On with the verandah in the morning. All this takes longer than we expected, but with a bit
of work we managed to get the joists all laid out correctly and remarkably level. In fact,
it looks like one of our problems will be that it has to join on to the old mini-verandah,
which isn't as level. The following photo shows how the decking rises to the left:

Di Saunders is leaving tomorrow, and Yvonne wanted to give
her a CD with some photos on it, to give to somebody who has (apparently) a computer but no
web access, presumably running Microsoft. That proved more difficult than I thought: apart
from the fact that some of the data is in AVI format, which Microsoft refuses to recognize
(“In order to display this photo, Windows needs to know what program created
it”). I wonder what the name of the program in the camera is. But after performing a
search, “Windows” recognized the format (or maybe just the file name) and came
to the conclusion that we had to buy software to display it.

Burning the CD was also a major issue: I made the mistake of giving the DVD burner
in teevee, the one I had always used, to Chris Richards last weekend, and it seems
that there are problems with the one in swamp, my test machine (which is, in fact, a
more recent model). Made three coasters before trying to do it with the burner
on boskoop, my Apple, instead.

How can people live with this stuff? Took a while to find that I needed an
“application” called Disk Utility.app. I still can't work out whether
it's prepared to make an ISO image, but trying to get it to burn the one I had was an
impossibility: of course there's no way to type in the name, and it wouldn't let me select
the file name of the ISO. Read the instructions, which told me to drag the icon from
one window to another (“computers for the illiterate”). That didn't work
either.

On a hunch, I did:

=== grog@boskoop (/dev/ttyp5)~1037 -> ln iso iso.iso

Then I was able to select iso.iso, but not iso, even though it was the same
file.

There was no way to specify burning speed, and burning took forever, with a ridiculous
progress bar:

After an hour, I went back to swamp and burnt a DVD with it, which worked once I had
got round to installing the right software and used the right DVDs—some old, dubious
ones just didn't work at all. Back to the Apple and decided that it had given up on the
drive, but it wouldn't let go: I couldn't stop the “Application”. That's not
peculiar to Apple: what is it about DVD drivers that makes them stay unstoppable for so
long? Turned off the (USB-attached) drive, which helped, but somehow managed to hang up the
USB bus, to which also the keyboard and mouse were connected, and had to reboot. Gave up in
disgust after that.

Apple has released more software updates, of course, a Java update. This time I was able to
download about 800 kB before I got this message:

Went out looking for it on the broken Apple web site, which tells me that the most recent
updates were released on “09/15/2008”. It was the right page, alright:
the previous Java update was mentioned there:

As the message at the top indicates (“2 matches”), this is the only Java update
mentioned on that page. Tried to fake a URL for the one I was looking for, but it wasn't
the same scheme. Finally went to Google, who
found it immediately. Why is Apple's web site so broken? And, of course, it loaded at
normal speed:

Finally we've got to the point of putting the decking on the verandah. And once again, it
wasn't the fastest thing in the world: the decking was almost all twisted or bowed, and some
of it had knot holes. In addition, keeping things parallel was more of an issue than I had
expected. After laying four widths (of 7 cm each), discovered that the last one was 2 cm
out of parallel with the front of the verandah. Interestingly, that required a compensation
of only 0.4 mm per board to get back into alignment by the other side of the verandah, so
used a rather incongruous tool for the adjustment: a feeler gauge, in steps of 0.1 mm across
the width of the verandah:

The weather was also quite warm, up to 26°, something I was no longer used to after the
winter, and it wasn't very pleasant in the sun. Gave up after 3 hours, by which time we had
done all of 8 boards out of 56. At this rate we'll take weeks to get it finished.

More work in the garden in the afternoon, and planted the Japanese maple close to the
birches. We're still puzzling about the Japanese cherry—there are dozens of different
types, and we don't know which one this is. We don't even know whether it flowers white or
pink, though I suspect the latter.

On with the verandah today, in the process discovering that we're still making too many
assumptions about the properties of the boards. In particular, keeping a constant gap from
uneven boards is a good way to make each successive board bow more than the predecessor. In
the end decided we'd have to measure from different places, and do a lot more by eye than by
straight measurement.

On the way to that discovery, found that we needed a spacer thinner than the 5 mm sheet of
metal we needed, say 4.5 mm. Where do you find something of that size? It took a while to
dawn: a drill bit. They typically come in sets, and the one CJ bought the other day goes in
0.5 mm steps from 1.5 to 8 mm:

House photo day again today, which took up a
lot of my time. Also read an article in c't about another “free” Microsoft-based photo processing program, PhotoPlus (or is that PHOTOPLUS?
They use both forms), and spent far too much time installing that. It started with the
registration: I had to enter details in their web site to get a registration key, but the
mail never arrived. Initially it was greylisted, and after an hour or so somebody told me
the key, which is generic and simplistic. Got the thing installed, started
it and couldn't stop it again: you need to do something with it (not the tutorials)
before the buttons are activated, and until then it takes over the whole Microsoft screen
and won't go away.

Moved it to FreeBSD only to discover that
wine didn't support it correctly:

That last line repeated continually until I stopped the program. Clearly an implementation
issue.

In the afternoon, racked my last brew of beer, which despite my concerns does seem to have
completed fermentation, and did some work around the terrace. Cleaned away tons of swallow
droppings, but didn't actually put on any new boards. I've decided that the swallows have
to go. The current presumed batch of eggs can hatch and leave the nest, and then we'll
remove the nest and any replacements.

Summer's here! Well, at least daylight savings time, the first time that it's changed over
at the beginning of October. The weather forecast was wrong again today. It had promised
cool, unpleasant weather, but in fact it was mild and very pleasant, and we spent most of
the day in the garden. Managed to finally plant the Lilly-pillies (apparently
Syzygium luehmannii,
or maybe Syzygium smithii, or maybe something else again) that Yana gave us at least 2
years ago. They're looking quite happy, but the roots weren't, and in one case I only
managed to salvage about a third of the root ball—they just came apart. I wonder
whether they'll survive.

How do you prune a Salvia
microphylla? The RHS treats them as shrubs
that need almost no pruning. My reality is different: new, more vigorous growth comes up
from the ground, while the flowers are on the old growth:

From a point of view of appearance, I should just chop off all the old canes and leave the
rest behind. But will they flower this year? I took the pragmatic approach and left the
flowering canes. When the new ones flower, I'll remove the old ones.

Tried to do some more work on the terrace, and got three nails in one plank before I
realized I still don't have the right method for ensuring that the boards are parallel.
More thought required.

Still no confirmation mail for PhotoPlus, which for some reason should have come from avanquest.de. Did
some investigation and found:

Where did it go? I have no idea. procmail showed that it was processed, and
apparently triggered content for postmaster@auug.org.au, but then it didn't seem to
go anywhere, certainly not to the postmaster file. I wonder if there's a bug in my
handling:

The problem is, there's no such link in the page, and there never has been. What's there is
a link to an external site:

<p>
<a href="http://www.nerdtests.com/nq_ref.html"><img
src="http://www.nerdtests.com/images/badge/93803cecb0f8113c.gif"
alt="I am nerdier than 100% of all people. Are you a nerd? Click here to find out!" /></a>
</p>

So how did this happen, and—apparently—for every link on the page? My
best bet is that this is some kind of crawler masquerading as Firefox, and that it was
broken, assuming that all links were on the same page.

Last Friday I lost an eBay auction under
rather strange circumstances: the seller had two identical items on offer, at a starting price of $18.99 and a
“Buy it now” price of $19.99. I decided to bid up to $19.50 on the first item,
and take the second one if I was outbid. I was outbid—7 seconds before the
auction ended, and for $20.00, and the other item disappeared. It's possible, of course,
that two people really did buy the items, but it looked strange to me.

What was even stranger is that the same vendor offered the same item today for a “Buy
it now” price of $18.99, less than the price I was prepared to pay on Friday. So I
bought it. Then I discovered that the auction I had won had started on 8 September. So
where was it yesterday? And why did anybody bother to outbid me if it was there already?
Strange indeed.

Chris and Fifi Yeardley over for dinner. David's currently
in Mariupol in Ukraine, and we're trying
to work out where he goes next.

Winter seems to have returned. The cool weather forecast for yesterday showed up today.
Spent most of the time indoors, conveniently taken up with further research into the new
system I'm planning to build. The first thing was to find the notes I had written; they
were in an Emacs buffer, which is where I would usually find them, but X had crashed
again in the interim, so I had to go looking for it in the file system. I was pretty sure
that the file name was new-hardware, but locate came up with nothing. After
some searching, discovered that I was right: I had written it
to /var/tmp/new-hardware, but it seems that that directory is not included in the
locate database. The things you learn in passing.

In the end it turns out that there's not too much to worry about except the display cards.
Can I use nVidia cards in an AMD motherboard?
I've seen things that suggest that there are problems, though on the face of it it seems
unlikely. But what about connecting D Sub (VGA) monitors to the cards, which nowadays
usually have DVI connectors? I've narrowed my search down to three cards, the Inno3D 9500 GT, a
number of apparently identical Gigabyte boards, and Galaxy GeFoce 9500GT, all
using the nVidia 9400 GT or 9500 GT cards. No documentation tells me if any of them
definitely do or do not come with a DVI to VGA adaptor, not even the manual, which also doesn't mention any difference between the three cards with this
chip set.

More interest in the ABC problems today. We've already established that the redirector at
http://abc.net.au/ doesn't adhere to HTTP, which is
at least part of the problem. But monitoring the transfer shows something else: if I
use telnet to talk to the redirector, I get the correct answer (though at the wrong
time):

That's too early; it shouldn't have responded yet. But the text is correct. If I use the
web browser, however, the initial H doesn't come at all. So Peter Jeremy is probably
correct in assuming that BST is at least partially to blame.

Enjoyed reading your Next-G experiences,
and can confirm that most others suffer a similar fate when engaging support.

James is the bloke who has shown that it is possible to write a functional driver for the modem I had, even
without the information that should be available to the Telstra people.

I'm still not done with the research for my new system. My questions to Megaware have still not been answered, possibly
because yesterday was a public holiday in New South Wales. In the meantime read up on
DVI, discovering
that things are even less clear-cut than I thought:

There are five different varieties of DVI: analogue-only (DVI-A, for VGA compatibility),
digital-only (DVI-D) and combined (DVI-I). The latter two can have single links or dual
links.

To connect a VGA monitor to a DVI connector, you need DVI-A or DVI-I.

The DVI-D specification limits the screen size to 2.75 Megapixels for a single link!
That would eliminate my 2048x1536 monitors. This restriction doesn't seem to apply to
DVI-A, however—I ran my DVI-connected IBM monitor at 2048x1536 back in
2001—but what an indication of the limitations of current technology!

Of course, almost none of the documentation I could find would tell me whether the boards
had DVI-D or DVI-I interfaces; I'm pretty sure that DVI-A is as good as non-existent, since
it's really only a way to connect VGA signals to a DVI plug, and in any case, all the cards
I'm looking at are dual link, which eliminates DVI-A, but which of the other two do the
cards have? On Peter Jeremy's indirect recommendation, checked the IJK web site, which offers similar hardware at marginally
higher prices. But I got a quick response answering 2 of the 3 questions I had: the cards
have DVI-I, and the shipping is so much cheaper that the overall price is better. Looks
like I'll go with them, assuming they can get the processor (Quad AMD Phenom 9550).

Much later I came back here looking for information on
what I had ordered and when. I drew a blank. After some investigation, discovered a mail
message from IJK in multipart/alternative format, and in the HTML version only there was a
link to the order status, which was still there. So now I know what I bought:

More work on the verandah. The more I look at it, the more complicated things seem to get.
Certainly the feeler gauge approach was seriously flawed because it assumes the planks are
of even thickness. Now I think I'll use drill bits as spacers in 5 different places, and
not deviate by more than 1 mm along the length of the plank.

Over with Chris and Fifi to visit Loes Pearson later in the afternoon. Fifi still hasn't
got her visa, and we need to provide lots more paperwork.

Finally I've decided on my new system! IJK have
confirmed that they can ship everything—the last thing to come is the processor, a
quad core AMD Phenom, due in stock tomorrow. Time to start the migration process, which
will start with a new teevee with the “1 TB” drive. Spent some time
working on my “new system” web page, which is such terrible shape that I won't
link to it now. Also downloaded an ISO from Wideband's mirror server—amazing that you can get free downloads on a satellite
connection—and noted that the performance degradation I've observed in the past didn't
occur on this transfer. I'm getting a good proportion of my 1 Mb/s bandwidth:

Installation is still a pain. This time the install of Emacs failed because of
conflicting ports installed by the old version of X.org, so removed all ports and started again. And, as always, it took forever.

Tony Nesci along to take another look at the air conditioner problems. He found a minute
leak which accounted for about 1.05 kg of R412A refrigerant, and fixed that, convinced that
that was the problem. I felt quite sorry for him when it proved not to be the case. After
further discussion with Fujitsu, they've decided to replace the whole unit. Isn't that an
expensive alternative to providing useful diagnostic tools? The problem is that the unit
cuts out when it should continue heating; all you need is some kind of logging that explains
why it cut out.

More work on the verandah. Try as I might, I seem to have difficulty getting the warps out
of the boards. At least things look tidier now.

Into town today for a multitude of tiny things: picked up the studio equipment that I had bought on eBay last week, and which arrived very quickly, bought some new thongs, and off looking for
cloth for studio backdrops and some curtain rails. Also to Bunnings looking for various garden stuff, almost
none of which I found. I did buy a soil moisture measurement device, which promises to be
of use.

Back home and unpacked my toys. To my surprise, my soil was too dry. In fact, everything
was—even water:

With a bit of salt in the water, it showed higher readings, up to or beyond 10. Clearly
another toy, measuring voltage and pretending to be able to guess moisture from that value.
I'd take it back, except that Bunnings are such a pain that it's not worth the trouble.
I'll just not go there again instead.

The studio lighting was another matter. On the one hand I found a damaged umbrella:

The first photo shows the spoke hanging down to the left. Potentially I could fix it, but
the second image, of the rivet, shows that it's a manufacturing defect, and I should have a
right to good merchandise. Sent a message to them asking for what to do.

On the other side, the equipment is quite good. The stands are solid, in fact more solid
than my tripod. It proves what I thought at the beginning: the description on eBay is
really bad, and in fact the equipment has additional features that weren't immediately
apparent.

The second two photos show the back of the lighting units, one taken with normal flash, and
one with the other lamp, showing how much better the illumination is like that. Things that
weren't described in the eBay auction include the slave flash capability (not, as the
instructions claim, on the back of the unit, but on top), although the units come with sync
cables (4m long, also not mentioned), they're not really needed. That's good, too, because
I'd need an adaptor to set off both flashes from the same master. One thing I did get out
of the auction was that the flash power adjustment is analogue (that's the black knob just
above the centre axis, currently pointing at ½), which will make it difficult to guess
exposures. On the other hand, the guide number 32 appears to include the umbrellas, so for
most things I can use an aperture in the range of f/8 to f/22.

More work on the verandah. Finally I'm getting my act together, and things are both going
faster and becoming more accurate. Hopefully we'll have the boards finished by the time CJ
comes back.

Mail from IJK today: my hardware is ready. All
I need to do is pay for it. For that, I had to go to the positively emetic ANZ bank web site and transfer the money. I'm getting in
practice now: I only had to restart once, and I was done in less than 30 minutes. But
that's the modern web for you.

As requested, sent off a reply to IJK and got a rather strange response:

HI
what info did you send to us
thanks

It included a mutilated header (my date Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:00:52 +1100 was changed
to Friday, October 10, 2008 11:00 AM, without time zone, clearly a Microsoftism),
but nothing else. Sent a reply and got another message telling me that my order would be
cancelled if I didn't pay within 7 days. Nothing useful. Sent a number of increasingly
irate messages during the day and finally got another reply:

pls tell us ur phone # .

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact me.

Somehow Microsoft email has got to the stage that many people just can't use it any more.

Continued installing the new teevee. While trying to install Project X, got a strange message:

===> projectx-0.90.4.00_2 depends on file: /usr/local/diablo-jdk1.6.0/bin/java - not found
===> Verifying install for /usr/local/diablo-jdk1.6.0/bin/java in /usr/ports/java/diablo-jdk16
===> Vulnerability check disabled, database not found

Because of licensing restrictions, you must fetch the distribution
manually.

with a web browser and "Accept" the End User License Agreement for
"Caffe Diablo 1.6.0". Please place the downloaded
diablo-caffe-freebsd7-i386-1.6.0_07-b02.tar.bz2 in /usr/ports/distfiles.

So I tried that, accepted what few conditions they imposed, and pressed the button to
download, and—nothing! Tried again on ceeveear (Debian Linux)
with iceweasel, and it worked fine. On comparison, it seems that I had a flash incompatibility; but I had exactly
the same version of flash on both systems. And this wasn't any old web site; it's the
FreeBSD foundation, using tools that
don't work well on FreeBSD. Clearly we have a serious problem with web browsers, almost
enough to make me change systems.

While I was at it, took a look at the empty space in the description of my studio equipment, and it proved that that, too, was a flash problem—the flash
content even included information about the slave (electronic) flash capability, which
yesterday I had reported as undocumented. Also heard from the vendor: they're sending a new
umbrella. That's the right kind of service. The light tent that I bought under somewhat strange circumstances last weekend is not. On Sunday they sent me a message
saying that the package would be sent out:

It takes around 36 hours, for your order will be packed and dispatched after it is
fully checked and passed by our QC team to ensure our products&#x2019; quality.

You will receive a shipping notification with all shipping details from us, once your order leaves our warehouse.

And that was all. The package should be coming from Melbourne, which is overnight, but 5
days later it still isn't here. Sent a reminder, but got no reply.

More work on the verandah; we're finally getting somewhere. 14 boards to go, and rather
surprisingly, it looks as if we'll have an exact number of boards.

Chris over in the afternoon. She has had no network connectivity since yesterday evening,
and thought, not without justification, that the problem was
with IPStar. That wasn't the case, however: I've had
good connectivity all the time. Further investigation suggests that LiSP, her “ISP”, have financial problems (or,
as they put it, “technical problems with our upstream provider”). I wonder how
the Broadband guarantee works there; last time I looked, people weren't allowed to change
ISPs.

Phone call from David at IJK computers today,
trying to understand what the sales department had asked him to resolve. He saw my mail
messages, confirmed that they got there, but didn't understand why the sales department had
had trouble with them. I suggested that he should maybe give them some coaching in using
email.

Finally it's getting warmer—almost too warm, in fact, and I couldn't do any work on
the verandah until afternoon, when the sun was behind the house. Instead more work on my
house photos; the time has come to retire some viewpoints, and to make up for it I'm adding
others, and also some panoramas:

hugin is a little strange to
use—I'm never sure when to do what—but in two things are fairly clear: I can
just use the default values, and that hugin is the kind of program I advocate, merely
a front-end to a series of programs, and the real story is in a Makefile (which it
considerately saves if you ask it to)—so I should be able to suck the details out of
it and add it to my automated scripts.

In the afternoon did some garden work and added another 4 boards to the verandah, after
which things got more complicated. We only have 68 cm to go, or 9 boards, and I don't have
that many unblemished boards, so I had to cut the ones I had into usable pieces. It's
non-trivial working out how to use the remaining partial boards, but it looks as if we'll
have enough and even a little left over.

Chris Yeardley along for dinner. It's fairly certain now that LiSP, her ex-ISP, has gone bankrupt, and she's looking
for a new ISP. Interestingly, IPStar themselves are
offering interim hosting for up to 30 days for free.

Over to Chris' place to take some horse photos today, returning with a lot of Asian
foodstuffs that Fifi had left behind when she left.

Back home and took a look at Chris' Dell Inspiron 5150, on which she had installed
PC Linux OS. I don't know what it is about
that name, but it irritates me. In any case, what little understanding I have of Linux
system administration relates to Debian and, to
a lesser extent, Fedora, so I suggested
I install Ubuntu on it. Started that off and
went away. When I came back later, the machine had powered down, something that Chris had
also mentioned. But this time it had happened without completing the installation. Tried
again and watched it: the fan was going all the time, and then it sped up even faster and
powered down; clearly the machine (a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4) was overheating. Tried again,
turning the CPU speed to minimum, but I was unable to complete the installation.

Instead, took the disk out an put it in my Inspiron 5100, where the installation completed
normally, and I was able to continue on Chris' machine—which no longer got so hot.
Are there issues with the Linux installation environment that ignore thermal constraints?

Interestingly, the new machine recognized Chris' Belkin USB wireless interface, claimed it
was up, but couldn't get it to transfer any data. She said that it worked out of the box
with PC Linux OS. I wonder if that's related to Ubuntu or my environment.

On with the verandah, getting another four complicated boards attached before Chris came
over to discuss her machine and network connection. Only 7 boards to go now. Inside and
finally got Chris back on the network, through IPStar's transition thing. Looks like she'll
be looking for a new ISP tomorrow.

CJ was due to come this morning, but it rained a little, I hadn't quite finished the boards
on the verandah, and I certainly hadn't done my homework about the roof, so we put it off
until Thursday. In the meantime, I finally did finish the boards, coming up
surprisingly neatly at the front. Thank God for that!

More talk on IRC about the problems I had recently with downloading software from the
FreeBSD Foundation web site. It seems that flash isn't involved. Oh well; I can't really
be bothered chasing this stuff up on the old machine.

Equal rights for photos!

My panorama photos have brought an issue to light: how large should they be in comparison to
standard portrait and landscape photos? The latter have a longer side of 300 pixels (for
“thumbnail” size) or 600 pixels (for “small” size), but if I apply
that to photos with extreme aspect ratios, the other side gets far too small. I've been
dodging the problem by imposing a minimum shorter side, but that can end up making the
photos unnaturally large.

Clearly what's needed is a generic size; I decided on a number of pixels (67,500 for tiny,
270,000 for small). This requires a number of calculations, including a square root,
something that you can't do in a shell script. On Callum Gibson's recommendation, used
dc, a program I've never used before. I suppose you can get used to it, but it's rather
arcane; this excerpt from the Makefile gives the idea:

MYWIDTH=`dc -e "2k$$HORIZPIXELS $$PIXELS ${PIXELS$@}/v/.5+0k1/p"`

This sets the “precision” (number of digits after the decimal point) to 2
(2k), pushes three values on the stack (shell variables HORIZPIXELS
and PIXELS and the make variable concatenation ${PIXELS$@}
(where $@ is the size), then divides ($$PIXELS by ${PIXELS$@}),
takes the square root (v), divides HORIZPIXELS by the result,
adds .5 for rounding, resets the “precision” to 0 (0k),
and divides the result by 1 to get a result with the new precision, and prints
it out. But at least it works. The question is, is it appropriate? I haven't made up my
mind yet. It certainly has an effect on things like the excerpt of the Google Maps web page below.

It's possible that I'll change the algorithm in the future, and that could alter the size
of images on this page, since they're generated from a PHP script. At the time of writing,
the image below has dimensions of 594x115 (tiny) or 1188x230 (small), which makes it rather
wider than I'd really like.

Use Microsoft if you want to shop here

More contact from IJK computers today, this time
from Jon Mascord, the sales manager, who told me:

Greg, we have been recieving your mail as an empty body with these 2
attachments. That's why some of the sales here have no idea whats going on
with your messages and have not replied to them. In any case , from
what I can tell your payment has been recieved and we should be shipping out
today.

I replied explaining the structure of MIME messages, and pointing out that the problem was
really just the way “Outlook Express” presented them:

Well, there's no such thing as an empty body with attachments. The
attachments *are* the body, and if that's all there is, they should
look at them. I note that neither you nor David had any difficulty
reading the mail.

I see now that you're using Microsoft "Outlook Express", which for
some reason doesn't display anything under these circumstances.
That's fine, of course, but you need to understand the strangenesses.
The full version "Outlook" doesn't have this particular problem. As I
said to David on Saturday, it would be good to explain this situation
to your sales staff.

To that I got the strange reply:

You can twist the meaning of "body" and "attachment" all you like , but
going on simple definitions there was no body and there was 2 strange (to a
non technical person) attachments.

Yes, we are using "Outlook Express" which is one of ; if not the most
widely used mail program; so I would probably suggest trying to fix the
issue at your end to avoid similar problems with those who wish to
help/reply to you.

I'm sure Jon doesn't really mean to say “forget Internet standards, in particular
RFC 1521: the de facto standard
is “Outlook Express”, and if you want to shop here, you need to work around the
deficiencies and those of our sales department”. But it certainly sounds like it, and
the attitude is far too prevalent. And in this case it's silly, too, because both he and
David have had no problems reading my mail. But clearly he thinks it's my fault, and not
that of “Outlook Express” or the poor staff who are required to use it.

Köter Rex and the panic-stricken riding school

One of the TV programmes we watch frequently is “Kommissar Rex”, called
“Inspector Rex” in English. It's a very silly detective story played
in Vienna, where the lead role (and
arguably the most intelligent actor) is a German Shepherd dog called Rex. We watch it less
for the story than for the Austrian ambiance, which can be quite quaint or amusing. Today
we watched an episode that took place close to
the Hofburg, which interested Yvonne more because of its proximity to the Spanish Riding School (in
German Spanische
Hofreitschule), so I checked Google Maps to see. For the fun of it, and to check Google's spelling checker, I
entered “panische Hofreitschule” (“panic-stricken riding school”).
It found it alright, but the message looked a little reduplicated:

That's four occurrences of the name of the city: Wien (German), Vienne (French) and two
Vienna (English).

And “Köter Rex”? That predates the TV series, itself not the newest, by more
than 10 years. In October 1982, shortly after I met Yvonne,
whose maiden name is Ködderitzsch, we visited her father, who lived
in Altea on the
Costa Blanca in Spain. He had a
German Shepherd dog, and of course he was called “Rex” (aren't they all? It's
worse than “Rover” in English). I found the combination “Rex
Ködderitzsch” amusingly close to “Köter Rex”, so that's what I called him.
“Köter” translates roughly as “mutt” in English. When the TV series
came along, I transferred the name to the series as well.

Lots of stuff to do in town today; somehow even preparation takes a long time. In the end,
decided we wouldn't be able to make it all, so left shortly after midday and took the
Commodore to Vic England for service, in the process discovering that the Magna was slowly
losing steering fluid. Also to the post office and picked up the hardware from IJK computers and a new umbrella for my studio equipment, as promised. By contrast, despite a couple of reminders, I've
heard nothing about the light tent that I bought under nearly two
weeks ago. That one looks like a case for negative feedback.

Years ago Yvonne had found some stuff to put under Lilac's
feeding bowl. but it had proved useful as a backdrop for photos too; unfortunately it was a
bit small, and also there was a fold in the middle. Today went looking for something
similar and drew an almost complete blank. Finally found an offcut of some vinyl at a
carpet shop. It's not as quiet in its pattern, and it's a lot thicker, which could cause
problems, but it only cost $5, so I can afford to experiment.

And that was all we had time for. On the way back home, stopped at Dahlsens to look around, coming out with a few plants
and a hover mower, the latter 50% reduced because it was the last one. What we didn't buy
was a Rhododendron “White
Lady” that I had really liked the look of; unfortunately the only specimen they
had was very large, in not very good condition, and cost $70.

On the other hand, Yvonne saw a Rhododendron that she wanted too, but we couldn't make up
our minds fast enough, and somebody else bought it. Decided to head on to Avalon nursery in
Haddon, where we looked in vain for interesting plants, and finally left empty-handed,
getting home round 16:00.

The lawn mower was a disappointment: it doesn't work. It's supposed to lift off the ground
to give a constant mowing height, but it didn't. Is this why they're not on the market any
more? Anyway, there's a 30 day “satisfaction guarantee”, and it's failed that,
so it'll go back on Friday.

Unpacked the hardware, which looks well packed and what I ordered. Was rather surprised by
the Microsoft software boxes, until I found they contained the disks. Also read the
instructions that came with the PCI-E display cards (which, as promised, included two DVI-I
connectors and one VGA adaptor) and read with horror:

Press this AGP card into the AGP slot firmly and make sure it is fully installed.

A bit of panic showed that this was just bad documentation; but then, who ever reads the
docco? On the other hand, it's nice to see really big file systems:

It's difficult to see that there is one less digit in “Used” than in
“Avail”. All the more reason for measuring the values in megabytes instead of
kilobytes; there might even be a case for measuring in gigabytes:

Now I have the new hardware, there's all the more reason to get the new teevee
working, since I need the case of the old one for the new system (should I call
it dereel or eureka?). Gradually things are coming into place, but I still
need to apply my own patches to mplayer. I'm not looking forward to that.

CJ along this morning to help put up the roof for the verandah, which I've decided to call
a stage—and I had fresh doubts. The problem is the height of the construct: 20
cm high beam, with 15 cm rafters and 5 cm battens on top of that, a total of 40 cm. The
starting point on the other side is quite low, and even without a drop, I'd end up with the
lower side of the beam about 1.90 metres above the floor, convenient for me to bang my head
against, and also not very attractive.

Did some discussion, and over to the Dereel Hall (next door, about 1.6 km away), where CJ
had seen a similar construction:

This one uses more flimsy wood than I chose, but the height is just as much, so changing
things wouldn't help much. Did some discussion of what we could do, and came to the
conclusion that we should put up more posts on the other side of the stage and put the
rafters between them. But then it occurred to me that I'd need a post in the middle of the
stage, something that I really don't want to do. One way or another, we still don't know
how to do it, so postponed yet again, and CJ set to helping Yvonne chop down an Acacia that had
long been slated for removal, and then burnt it off, along with a lot of stuff that still
hasn't been done:

We've been waiting to finish the roof before planting the plants around the stage, but the
weather is getting warmer, and we can't wait any more. In the afternoon, set to preparing
beds for vegetables and herbs, not helped much by the flies, which seem a lot worse this
year than last; hopefully that's not a result of the horses round the place.

While doing this work, we saw a lot of traffic to the swallow's nest. Presumably they're
not happy that we're there so often. Well, tough. We tried to warn them two months ago, but they had to rebuild the nest. Maybe they'll change
their mind next year; in the meantime, with the help of a mirror, confirmed that they have
four eggs on the way:

Also work on the new teevee. I have been running a modified version of mplayer on the old machine, and due to library
changes, it no longer works on FreeBSD 7.1. mplayer itself has changed considerably between versions “1.0pre8”
and “1.0rc2”, though with names like that you'd expect the structure to remain
stable at least until they can release version “1.0” (several years after
ostensibly stable versions became available). Finally got it finished, not without some
problems.

Another toy in the mail today: a flash remote control. You put a transmitter in the flash
shoe, and connect the flash to the receiver. Couldn't wait to try it out, of course, not
even for breakfast. It did nothing. I tried all combinations of the two DIP switches, to
no avail. Finally checked the battery:

It's barely visible, but the whole thing was packed in plastic. After unpacking—in
itself surprisingly difficult—it worked, sort of: there appears to be some timing
issue, and while I can run the studio flashes at 1/320 s when connected directly, I need to
increase the time to 1/200 s with this device. Still, that's more than the 1/180 s that
Olympus allows.

More work in the garden, while Yvonne went shopping. She
came back with my final toy, the light tent that I bought on eBaynearly two weeks ago. While the last
couple of things came from Hong Kong, this one came from Melbourne; clearly it couldn't have
been posted earlier than Tuesday of this week, and probably on Wednesday. I still have
received no reply to my messages asking what's going on, so this people get a neutral
feedback—neutral because the thing seems to correspond to the description (though they
didn't mention that all the cloth is full of wrinkles, which makes me wonder how to use it
at all).

Instead, tried out my new vinyl backdrop taking some photos of my 1824 Savary jeune,
in the process discovering that it's really an 1826
Savary jeune:

Had a surprising amount of difficulty with white balance, requiring me to manually correct
it in almost every case. That may be due to the different colour temperature of the
modelling lights and the flash. I need to find a better solution.

Continued work on the new teevee, noting a couple more problems. In particular,
mplayer didn't build
with XvMC support, one of the main reasons I
bought nVidia cards for my new machine. Spent
some time investigating, and found this the Makefile:

OPTIONS+= NVIDIA "Enable experimental nvidia xvmc driver" off

Tried that (make -DNVIDIA=on all), to no avail. Then I found another line:

... it prevents building very recent 6.x and 7 installations with the binary nvidia driver
due to a currently unresolved linking problem with libm.

The issue was that it referenced (I'm not sure you can say “needed”) an older
version of libm. But that's easy: just provide it. I did that, removed the
restriction, and built. The build showed all the nice xvmc modules being built, but
the resulting executable still claimed it couldn't do XvMC!

Round about here I gave up, at least for the day. The interesting thing is that the new
processor is so much faster than the old one that you don't really need XvMC to
decode 720p HDTV, the highest we get here. But it's very frustrating to see this kind of
regression.

Another problem I have is with the nfe driver (apart from the horrible font size changes that the
FreeBSD web pages impose): after a cold start,
it doesn't work. It reports things like:

Experiment shows that an ifconfig nfe0 down up is enough to fix the problem,
and it stays fixed across a reboot. But how do you handle that on a machine that doesn't
have a keyboard and relies on a network connection to work at all? It proves that the
following entry in /etc/rc.conf is sufficient:

ifconfig_nfe0="192.109.197.158 down up"

The command is passed directly to ifconfig, so you can put what you want in there.
It's also interesting to note that transfers with this NIC are as fast as I have seen on 100
Mb Ethernet, up to 11.2 MB/s sustained traffic.

Why I hate the web

I put a lot of photos on the web, and I spend a lot of time trying to present them the way I
want them to look. Others don't go to so much trouble: they put their photos on services
like flickr. It's very popular. Today I got a
couple of URLs from a friend of mine, each showing a collection of photos. After trying to
work my way through them, I can't understand why people would want to use it:

The photos are tiny! The thumbnails are 75x75 pixels (5625 pixels), less
than a postage stamp, and the default (“small”) size appears to be 240x160
(38400 pixels, only a little more than half my “thumbnail” size). The
thumbnails are also square, thus truncating the image; but at that size, it's not clear
that that's a bad idea.

The largest size that my friend posted was 500x333 (1665000 pixels), smaller than my
“small” photos. To be fair, this doesn't appear to be a restriction of
flickr, because Juha Kupiainen has posted much larger ones.

At this tiny size, they only put one photo on a page, though they all would have fitted on
the screen.

To make matters worse, at this size there's no navigation. You have to go back to the
small “detail” window and select the next one.

To make up for that, the pages are very noisy; there's stuff everywhere.
That's the stuff that should be accessible via a link, not the media
themselves.

On the “detail” page, the descriptions of the photos are limited to three
lines, at least on my screen. To read the lot, you have to go to the single photo

This particular set of photos was related to an address, and Flickr thoughtfully included
a link to a map—which appeared in its own window and disabled the main photo until
it was closed again. What earthly use is that? You'd think people were trying to make
things more difficult to use.

To accentuate the fact that this is not a problem peculiar to flickr, I got another link
later in the afternoon, again to an online photo site with similar restrictions. I think
the real issue is the attempt to find a solution that will work for everybody without
adjustments. That's bound to give second-rate results.

On the front left is the new photo tent, then the studio lights (flashing against the
walls), the photo backdrop I bought the other day, and behind (right photo) are the
components for the new machine I'll build as soon as I get the other ones sorted out.
Behind that, invisible, are some brewing equipment that remind me it's time to brew another
batch of beer, and behind the curtains is the stage, which still needs a roof.

As last year, the jump from cool late winter days to warm early summer days appears to have
occurred without much intervening spring. Today the temperature was 30°, and though I did
some work in the garden, it wasn't really the weather.

Instead spent a surprising amount of time with the final touches to teevee. On the
one hand, it went well, on the other hand I seem to have lost a script (or maybe a shell
function), and for some reason mplayer was reporting incorrect times and offsets when restarted in the middle of a film. Finally
found what was causing that. In the function new_demuxer () I found:

d->movi_start=stream->start_pos;

When you use the -sb option (start byte offset), stream->start is set to that offset; otherwise it's set to some value close to
the start. Is that what we want? I don't know; I suppose it depends on the intention of
the -sb option. If it's for skipping junk at the beginning of the file, it's the
right choice. If it's for starting in the middle, it's wrong. I'm not going to get
involved in that one. For me the solution is simple:

There's something strange about our water system. We've seen various particles in the
filter mesh that I suspected came from the water tanks, but several months ago I put in a filter, and they're still collecting:

Last month Diane Saunders brought me a couple of plants as a birthday present. One of them,
a Leucospermumconocarpodendron/galbrium cross, with the rather silly name “Mardi gras
ribbons”, promises to be quite pretty, and there are many smaller buds coming out:

Now that teevee is running relatively well, the next step would be to build the new
machine. Well, almost. The motherboard in the old teevee is still relatively
usable, while that in ceeveear is a little dubious: Linux doesn't want to trust the
ACPI, I couldn't get XFS to run in DMA mode on the second IDE controller, and the Ethernet
interface kept hanging. All of this could be a problem in the Linux version, of course, but
it also isn't very fast, so it made more sense to use the old teevee as the
new ceeveear, and use the old case of ceeveear (pretty much the same as all my
cases) for the new machine.

Moved the disk, tuner and Ethernet card to the new motherboard, and it worked relatively
well. Almost. It couldn't bring up the Ethernet interface, eth1. Further
examination showed that it only knew about eth3 and eth4, and still further
investigation showed that the motherboard has an on-board NIC, thus the two interfaces. I
still don't understand how Linux numbers its NICs; does it remember all that have ever been
there, and keep incrementing the numbers? In any case, it proved that the on-board Ethernet
chip works fine (until proof of the contrary), so I used that. For further reference: the
files that need to change (at least in KnoppMyth, a Debian-based distro)
are /etc/network/interfaces and (in this
case) /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth3.

Next to the real machine. What should I call it? I started using two computers on my
desktop about 15 years ago. Then they were called allegro and freebie.
When I came back to Australia, I renamed them wantadilla and echunga. So
when I got here I called them dereel and eureka. But now I'm going back to
a single machine. What should it be called?

Years ago, when we got our first Tandem Integrity S2, we called it trio, because it
had three pseudo lock-step CPUs. And then we renamed our LXN to solo, for obvious
reasons. Then, after I left Tandem, James Cox named their next machine quattro,
presumably because he knows more about cars than music. I don't even think it had 4 CPUs.
Years later, when working on SMPNg, I called my dual processor machine zaphod, as
you do. And the single processor test machine was called monorchid. That's still
running, now called brewer,
but the kernel is still MONORCHID. This new machine has a quad core, so I think
I'll call it quartet, to finally make my point to a James Cox who has completely
forgotten about the incident.

The components are interesting: one of the reasons I bought a new machine was to save
power (one machine instead of two), but I wonder if I'll achieve that goal. The
difference in the power supplies is particularly obvious. The new supply is on the left.

Set to putting the new machine together; the biggest problem was the documentation. AMD
delivers a sheet of paper about A2 in size describing how to install all its
processors. It's up to the user to unfold it correctly and find the descriptions for the
processor in question. There's text in about 10 languages, but only the warranty
descriptions and warnings about how not to hurt yourself. The installation instructions
themselves are IKEA-like, only drawings and
arrows, some of which I didn't understand. The important thing, of course, is to get the
cooler over the processor. Do you need to add thermal grease? According to AMD and also
the motherboard installation instructions, yes. Then there's a text somewhere else
explaining that the cooler already comes with a coating of thermal grease. And how do you
attach the cooler? Arrow! And the drawing doesn't show the lever. Here's how it should
look when it's finished:

Installing the motherboard was a similar story, as was installing the display card.
According to the motherboard instructions, you must connect an additional 12V supply to PCIe
x16 display cards. But there's no connector on the cards. Which output does the BIOS come
up on? No information. I guessed the upper one, and indeed it worked, but maybe only
because it detected the monitor. What happens when it comes up with two monitors remains to
be seen.

Still, the installation worked without a problem, and it's certainly a lot faster than the
old machines. Installing all the software will keep me busy for days to come.

Yet another keyboard is falling apart! That's quite a drama, because it's a Northgate
OmniKey Plus, and I can't find any comparable modern keyboard. The problem is that
the Enter key sticks down, producing interesting results. A couple of months ago I
damaged the mounting of the Enter key on another keyboard, so this time I was a
little more careful. The key is quite large, and in addition to the switch connector,
there's a secondary guide and a stabilizing clip:

It seems that it was the secondary guide which was jamming. A bit of graphite on the part
of the key that goes into the guide (grey in the photo above) seems to be all that was
needed. The clip on the right holds the stabilizing clip to the base plate; on the other
keyboard I managed to damage it so that it slipped through the hole.

The shoot off to the left of the stem near the blue baling twine was definitely recognizable
as a double leaf yesterday, but today it seems to have withered away. What's the problem?
Not enough water? Too much wind? It's getting watered via the sprinkler system, but
possibly not enough.

Into town for a discussion about my investments. Somehow Peter and I don't see eye to eye
on what a report should include. The reports I get are multi-page with coloured pie charts,
but do they tell me what I want to know? I handed Peter a sheet with the following written
on it:

What I want to know:

How much did the portfolio earn last quarter?

How much did we estimate the portfolio would earn last quarter?

How did the portfolio value change?

As he said, he would need a calculator and a bit of time to extract that information from
that report and the previous one. But isn't that the most important information? It seems
that part of the problem is what I continually rant about: the software tells you what you
can know, and the software they have doesn't cater for this kind of information. In my
book, that makes the software both inflexible and badly designed. With almost any directly
accessible database it should be trivial to get the information I need.

The good news, though, once I extracted it: despite the dismal market situation, my
portfolio is performing well, and income exceeded outgoings by 60%. If it stays that way,
we have nothing to worry about.

To Dahlsens to return the hover mower
last Friday, but they found the problem: it had been
assembled (by them, before going on display) with the blade the wrong way round. After
replacing it, it did lift off, though not very far, so I took it back again. Also bought
some smaller Azaleas and
a Fuchsia, at much better prices.

Back home and tried out the mower again. Yes, it works better. But it's still not good.
These silly safety mechanisms require you to squeeze with both hands all the time, and even
after a few minutes it becomes very uncomfortable. In addition, it doesn't really hover
high enough to make it easy to move it. I think it'll go back again.

This builds the complete system software with between one and 10 parallel threads. The
results were interesting: up to 4 threads (the number of CPUs) showed a significant
performance increase, almost linearly, but after that it tailed off markedly, as the
following graph (thanks to Callum Gibson) shows:

I wonder how much that has to do with the SMP implementation and how much with the
limitations of the build process.

Some discussion about the granules in the water, without much in the way of conclusions.
The general feeling is that it's probably something with calcium in it, but how did it get
there? Conceivably it could have come into the system in dissolved form (calcium
bicarbonate, for example) and then precipitate in the hot water system. Took a look at the
filter, which showed nothing of great interest.

One of the more interesting things about Tinyurl is that you can choose your own abbreviation (as it turns out, with a minimum of 6
characters). Tried it today and generated two which could be of use to point people at:

More experimentation with studio photos today. I have a lens which I want to sell on
eBay, and for that I need a good photo. I've
already taken something with my umbrella setup, but that was the main reason for buying the
tent that took so long to arrive. Today did some comparisons. Left the umbrellas, right
the tent:

Also discovered that the uneven lighting I've been seeing in some photos isn't due to uneven
lighting, but the shutter speed. It seems that my assumption that 1/320 s will work with
flash doesn't apply all the time. At 1/250 s it works fine, as the lens photos show.

Phone phishing: the next security catastrophe

Phone call this morning from somebody claiming to be Jasmine from Red Energy, my electricity supply company. She had
something to discuss with me, but of course first she wanted to authenticate me: she asked
for my date of birth.

Yes, of course the URL above makes it easier by limiting results to those containing the
year of my birth. Without that, you'd still find it, but you'd have to wade through
(currently) about 11,500 results

This isn't the first time that I've mentioned this in this diary, but it seems to be
becoming more prevalent. There are two obvious problems here: first, my date of birth is
easy to find on the web, and secondly, how do I know who “Jasmine” is? I asked
her to authenticate herself, and of course, she said “I can't”. So I refused.

Called back to Red Energy (131 806) and spoke to Emma, who clarified the problem they had:
last quarter's electricity bill was so high that they weren't allowed to direct debit the
sum without my express permission. So why wasn't something mentioned on the bill? She
didn't seem to think that was necessary.

And of course she didn't understand the issue. She explained—several times—how
they would be liable to criminal charges if they abused the information they got. In the
end I gave up and asked for a security representative to call me back.

In the meantime, discussed the matter on IRC:

* groOgle receives a phone call. [12:52]
<groOgle> "Hi, I'm Jasmine from Red Energy. I have an issue with your
electricity bill".
<groOgle> "First, can you please tell me your date of birth?".
<groOgle> What's wrong with this picture?
<callum> phone spam!? [12:53]
<callum> or maybe phone phishing?
<groOgle> Exactly.
<groOgle> It really was Red Energy, of course, as I confirmed when I called
back.
<groOgle> But I complained, and they don't understand why.
<callum> dear oh dear [12:54]
<callum> although everyone knows your date of birth.
<callum> so it wouldn't have proven anything. Perhaps if you'd given them the
wrong date... [12:55]
* uridium nods
<uridium> Red Energy .. sounds positively socialist.
<callum> Equal voltage for everyone! [12:56]
<groOgle> callum: That's the other issue.
<groOgle> I was talking with my investment advisor about that yesterday.
[12:57]
<groOgle> He doesn't understand either.
<callum> My bank use a password/passphrase in addition to birthdate.
<groOgle> Do they also call you up and ask for it? [12:58]
<Darius> groOgle: all too common :(
<groOgle> My bank does that too, but they don't call me up.
<groOgle> Telstra does that too, and they *do* call you up and ask for it.

Red Energy did call back, represented by Kate, who discussed the matter and understood it.
I suggested that they should print a code on the electricity bills which the representatives
could quote to confirm that they really were who they said they were. That's only half the
issue, though; until the man in the street understands the issues, it'll still be possible.

Yvonne woke up this morning feeling decidedly unwell. It
appears she's caught a cold, and she spent the whole day in bed. That didn't have any
direct effect on me, but it's surprising how large the indirect effect is.

Tony Nesci along round midday with yet another approach to fixing the air conditioner: he
removed all the refrigerant, weighed it and refilled with the correct amount. That was well
worthwhile: according to the specifications panel, the correct charge should be 3.3 kg; in
fact, he removed 6.7 kg:

That included the 1.05 kg that he put in—on Fujitsu's
instructions—a couple of weeks ago.
After replacing the 3.3 kg, the machine worked!

What's wrong with this situation? Many things:

Clearly the unit was shipped with far too much refrigerant. That's an obvious quality
control issue. I've seen the leak that Tony found, and it's clear that there was once
even more refrigerant in the unit.

The advice from Fujitsu to add even more refrigerant was wrong.

The unit just failed without any indication of why.

The problem is a “traditional” one—it's existed for as long as heat
pumps. But everybody, myself included, blamed the new-fangled electronics. Given the
fact that it didn't report the problem, despite the fact that it's a relatively common
one, our distrust wasn't completely unfounded, of course.

Today Tony finally arrived with documentation for the unit. If he had been given
that earlier, it wouldn't have taken quite as long to solve the problem.

Even the information on the specification panel is not beyond doubt. It also states that
this unit is for 240 V supply; in fact, Australian mains are 230 V. It's possible that the
unit is really not correctly matched to the Australian power system, but I suspect that it's
simply sloppy documentation. Nobody goes and changes the voltage input based on that panel,
but air conditioner technicians will charge the 3.3 kg based on the panel.

From my own point of view, it's clear that I, too, had jumped to the wrong conclusions.
I'll have to completely rewrite my product
review in light of this information.

Also did another comparison of the parallelism of software builds, this time building
kernels. The results weren't as clean as when building worlds, presumably because of the
more monolithic nature of the build:

Finally I was brave enough to try the X configuration for quartet, with only one
card. It gave me only one display. Did some playing around with the nVidia tools, and still got the same results. Playing
around, including without X, showed:

As I suspected, if I only connect one monitor to the card, that monitor becomes the
startup console, no matter which connector I use, and the other stays dark.

If I connect two monitors, the bottom connector becomes the system console, the opposite
of what I expected.

When I started X, I got the same display on both monitors.

Spent some time browsing the web and found
a description
on the nVidia web site (why do they use ftp protocol?)

It seems that the link broke some time between 2008 and 2017.

which told me what to do. You'd have
to guess: a single head X configuration doesn't include PCI IDs, while multi-head ones do.
I knew that, but I couldn't find the PCI ID for the second head. That's clear now: it's the
same ID, and you distinguish with the Screen keyword. So the difference in the
Device section is:

Yvonne is still sick! She stayed in bed all day. I don't
know when she's been hit this hard by a common cold.

Spent more time bringing up the new computer. Changing system names is a real mess; I
should have remembered that from last time I did this, only a little over a year ago when I
moved here and renamed wantadilla and echunga to dereel
and eureka respectively; I still haven't completely recovered from that change. So
once this mess is over, I'll rename quartet to dereel.

Finally got brave enough to try starting X on quartet with all three graphics cards
installed. It needed bravery: the first time round, the system paniced:

The PCIe graphics cards are one with the brass coolers, while the old PCI card in the
right-hand slot has an aluminium cooler. The left-hand PCI slot, barely visible under the
heat sink, is blocked by the right-hand PCIe card. I suppose I could find thinner ones, but
there's obviously a reason that the PCIe slots are so far apart.

Lots more experimentation finally got things working. It was clear that the old card was
confusing the nVidia driver, so I removed it and gradually added heads. It appeared as if
one of the many problems was the lack of a monitor on the outputs, so dragged in a couple of
monitors, and connected the other two outputs to monitors on my desk. Like that I got four
monitors up and running. The ones on the desktop are the second from the left and the
extreme right:

There are two programs called lpr; the second was installed by CUPS, in turn installed by some port which thinks it needs
it. I've had problems with CUPS in the past, so much so that I gave up trying, despite
various claimed advantages. At any rate it doesn't seem to be an upwards compatible drop-in
replacement for the BSD spool system. Possibly it's looking for a CUPS version
of lpd. In any case, renaming /usr/local/bin/lpd
to /usr/local/bin/lpd.cups solved the problem.

Peter Jeremy commented on the air conditioning saga, and asked about how much refrigerant is
required for the tubes connecting the inside units to the external units. In our case it's
considerable. The answer (which Tony Nesci told me last time he was here): 30 g per 3
metres. If this sounds like a roundabout way of saying “10 g per metre”, you
need to understand that it's “metric”; it almost certainly used to be “1
ounce per 10 ft”, and it applies to the distance between the units, not both tubes.
With the amount we're talking about here, it would make about 300 g. But in this case,
Fujitsu have explicitly stipulated that no extra refrigerant should be added.

Yvonne's still in bed! She's gradually getting better, and
by the evening she was able to get up and watch TV for a while, but there's still a way to
go.

Into town to do the shopping, surprisingly late, and didn't get everything finished. Back
home, spent a lot of time trying to work out why I can't run powerd
on quartet; it seems that some sysctls aren't being initialized. Spent some
time looking through the code—the first kernel code I've looked at in a
while—and in the end, it almost looks as if the processor chip is not returning the
correct status bits to indicate that it is capable of power throttling. cpuid
reports:

80000007 00000000 00000000 00000000 000001f9

It seems that the last word on this line requires a 0x6 set, but the contents
are 0x1f9. There's a question, of course, as to whether this is just out-of-date
FreeBSD software. To be investigated.

Once again photo day, but today's processing was different: now I have the stuff
on quartet, so somehow I need to distribute the processing across four CPUs. How do
you do that? The canonical way is with make, but that's a relatively complicated
way, especially if you're passing arguments. One example is a script that converts the
full-size images to smaller ones. It requires five variables: the name of the tools
directory, the name of the directory into which to place the image, the size of the image,
the number of pixels it should have, and the name of the web directory. Did some work and
came up with a solution for one of the conversion programs (raw to JPEG),
requiring make to start a script that runs make again, which in turn runs a
second script in parallel. You can pass that all to make with
corresponding -D descriptions, but then you still end up with a shell script full
of $$ and \. There should be a simpler way.

On with the conversion of quartet to the new dereel, renaming the
old dereel to swamp in the process. It's clear that I have a basic problem
with the display cards I'm using: I can't find a way to run the GeForce 9500 cards in dual
head mode without the proprietary nvidia driver. That works fine as long as
they're the only cards in the system. But when I physically add a GeForce 4000MX card, not
supported by this incarnation of the driver, and even if I don't mention it in the
configuration file, the driver goes and pokes around in it anyway and ends up crashing the
system. Dragged out a few other PCI cards, all well over 10 years old, and tried the newes
one, a Matrox MGA 2064W, but X no longer recognizes
it and instead selects the vesa driver. For some reason, that didn't work
either—it just crashed the system. Maybe the nividia driver is still to
blame. Maybe it doesn't coexist with any other drivers. In the end, decided to fire up the
new dereel with only four displays, and wait until later before adding the fifth.

Today the weather was relatively dull, and the resultant photos looked correspondingly dull.
Played around with ufraw and found some knobs to tweak, in particular the transfer
curves, which somehow manage to work better than they do in xv. There's also a way
to save them, so I was able to convert the whole set of photos with the same curve. Well,
once. When I tried again later, I got:

Why? Does this message mean that it no longer likes the name syntax (maybe because I didn't
put a space in it?), or what other reason? ktrace shows that it doesn't try to
access any file of that name, and the man page is not very reassuring about the way the
program works:

CURVE can be the filename (without path) of any curve that was
previously loaded in the GUI.

Why without a path? What's it trying to do? And how do you load a curve with the
GUI?

More input from Peter Jeremy on the power management of the Phenom: it seems that they've
changed the setup:

<peter> groOgle: Regarding cpufreq, have a read of
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/31116.PDF
- particularly pages 291-292. AMD have obsoleted the VID/FID bits and
replaced it with a new flag (cpuid(0x80000007)[3] & 0x80) which points
to a collection of new registers. [19:50]
<peter> FreeBSD doesn't currently support the new P-State registers but that
document appears to include enough detail to implement it. (It looks
like you can control the core frequencies independently). [19:56]

More photo work today, this time with the new dereel, which has four processors.
Finally got round to looking at the issue of doing things in parallel, and came up with a
small program which reads commands from stdin and
executes them in parallel. I'm not really happy with the approach—it means
considerable rewriting of existing scripts—but it does the job. I need to think of a
better approach.

Followed up on Peter Jeremy's link yesterday and found the strangest license agreement yet.
Most appear to be truncated, but this one doesn't even say what the license is for:

Is it the document? That's from AMD. Is it Acroread? On the face of
it, it must be, but why does it appear now? I've long since accepted the license, such as
it appears to be. It certainly shows the stupidity of this licensing approach.

Found a strange mess of convoluted files in /home/grog/.wine-virgin—somehow I
had had a circular symbolic link in the structure, and when I copied it across to the new
machine, unravelling the symlinks, it kept copying until it hit PATHMAX, the
maximum path name length of 1024. By that time it had copied about a million files.
Deleted them and saw something I've never seen before:

Oct 26 11:27:27 dereel kernel: ad4: FAILURE - out of memory in start

That's from the disk driver, and it's fatal. I had to reset and reboot the machine, and
even then it failed in fsck after about an hour with a full lost+found
directory. That repeated a couple of times before I got the whole mess sorted out. It
seems that this is a known issue with soft updates, and I should have disabled them.
Certainly one argument against soft updates.

Finally got round to putting up some wires for my hops. During the work, found a surprise
in the garage:

It's a ferret, and clearly a tame one; far
from running away, it came towards me. As usual I had sandals on, and I wasn't sufficiently
confident to let it touch them, but it was clear that it must be some kind of pet. When
Yvonne came back, I showed it to her.
“A weasel! Careful, it might have
rabies!”. I suppose some reactions
die hard; there's no rabies in Australia.

This has never worked for me, and as the image shows, it didn't work today. In the past
I've been able to get by the problem by selecting “Enrol later”, but today I
didn't get that option. Called up the service line, once I had found the number (13 33 50),
selected “Verified by Visa” from the menu, and was connected to Sarah, who
immediately put me through to Bennett in “Internet” (i.e. web) banking. He reset the
flag which suppressed the “Enrol later” selection, allowing me to do my
transfer—this time. At the end, I was told I would have to enrol next time. That's
enough reason to change my credit card.

Woke up just before 3 am to hear the UPSs beeping and no power. It came back at 3:14, but
stayed only for 7 minutes before dying again. To add insult to injury, the fire alarm
outside my bedroom door started beeping slowly, about once a minute, indicating that the
battery needed changing. Despite everything I did, I couldn't get back to sleep: the next
beep came at exactly the wrong time.

How do you remove a fire alarm? They're all different, and this is the first time I have
dealt with one of this kind. In the end, a bit of force did the job, and I finally got some
sleep. Later I discovered that the alarm has a non-replaceable rechargeable battery that
should maintain its charge for 2 months. Looks like we need to replace it.

Woke round 9 am to find that the power still hadn't been restored, and the phone wasn't
working either. Down to the General Store, where there had been no power failure, and
called up Powercor on 13 24 12, speaking to Tim. While we were talking, at 9:44, the power
failed—two recloser events followed by a complete failure. That looks like two
unrelated power problems, both affecting us.

Back home and tried to ignore the failure. Fortunately the phone had started working
again—I wonder if one of the electric phones did something silly when the power went
away—so called back just after 12:00 and got a recorded message telling me that power
would be restored by 12:00. Spoke to Shane, who couldn't give me any more detail, but
suggested I call back at 13:00.

Spent the time wiring up some more hops, but even that could have done with power tools.
Got three more done, so I'm now about half way. Called Powercor back just after 14:00 to
hear the recorded message that power should be restored by 14:00. Spoke to David, who told
me that there were a number of failures today; our failure affected 706 customers
between Corindhap
and Mount Mercer, but it was dwarfed
by another one in Hamilton, where 30,000 people were affected. He couldn't tell me what the
cause was, and they had gradually given up trying to quote a fix time.

Off with Yvonne to Diggers St Erth garden near Blackwood, where we spent a lot
of money on some quite reasonable looking books and some gardening equipment; looks like
we'll grow some vegetables after all.

Got back round 18:00—still no power. Called up for a fourth time and spoke to
Jacinta, who told me that all power had been restored for the 9:44 failure by 18:00, but
they couldn't tell me when they would have time to look at our problem—after 15 hours
down! The team leaders had gone home, and the dispatch room people weren't prepared to give
her any indication. Left a complaint with them and outside again, while Yvonne prepared to
move to Chris' place for the night.

Helen from across the road came over to complain about the situation. It seems that they
have two phase power, so they only had lost half their power. Clearly this was another case
of a fuse giving out. About 30 minutes later a Powercor van showed up, I told him about the
half power, and he headed off to look at the fuse. It wasn't as simple as I had expected:
one of the cables going into the fuse housing had been broken off by a combination of wear
and weather:

That didn't work immediately. The new fuse housings are probably a lot better
weather-proofed, but they don't seem to attach to the pole as well as the old ones, and the
connection's pretty wobbly. But it didn't take too long, and at 19:31 we were back up
again, after about 17 hours without power.

We had a similar problem this time last year, as the
result of a storm, and we were without power for 14 hours. There had been some bad weather
last night, but not nearly as bad as last year, but this time we were without power for 17
hours. I'm not at all happy, and I fear that we are going to have more problems.

Spent a lot of time today tidying up yesterday's mess, which mainly involved documenting the
situation. In the process also wrote a letter to ANZ asking them to keep me
away from this stupid “Verified
by VISA” scheme. I wonder if they'll do anything. It's interesting to note
that there's a general sentiment that this is nonsense, and The Register has reported potential exploits similar to those I described earlier.

Also spent a bit of time playing around with nvidia-settings, a program to tune the video cards. It does quite a good job:
my old Hitachi 813 monitors (now 8½ years old) are fading badly, but the settings can almost
compensate for it. It's also one of the few GUI programs that seems to do its thing right,
including immediate context-dependent help in a separate window. Just a pity that I can't
find out how to set some of the things it reports on, such as “PowerMizer”.

Phone call from Eddie Barkla from Powercor to apologize for what happened yesterday. He
confirmed what I suspected: the problems are systematic, in this case (wouldn't it have to
be!) with their computer system. So the only way for them to recognize the first of two
problems, where the second masks the first, is manually. You'd think that the very least
would be that they would merge the problems and confirm that all symptoms have been
eradicated. The real issue, though, is why it took them so long to fix the main problem:
power was down from 9:44 to 17:00.

Also asked him to check on the mounting of the fuse holder. I wonder if that will happen.

A bit more garden work—it's sorely needed. Planted one of the plants we bought
yesterday, a Salvia“Indigo Spires” (what kind of name is that? It's a cultivar without a
species), which we hope will be like the blue Salvias we saw in
the Royal Melbourne Botanical Gardens a
few months ago. We were also going to plant
some Ipomoea (Morning Glory), but tripped
over the instructions: on one packet (alba) it said “pour hot
water over seeds, then plant”, and on the other (tricolor) it said
“pour warm water over the seeds and soak for two hours”. But how hot? How
warm? This is the first I've heard of this treatment, and all my clever gardening books
don't mention it. I wish this kind of detail were more generally available.

Also some irrigation stuff; I'm gradually encircling the stage with irrigation.

More work on the new dereel today, and managed to migrate the web server. Apache wasn't as much trouble as I thought, but squid and PHP were more—the latter got installed without things as basic as Perl-compatible
regular expressions, and just finding them was a problem (it's in the
port www/php5-extensions, while PHP itself is in www/php5.

More work in the garden, making slow progress. It's time we put the roof on the stage.
Called CJ up, and he's planning to come to look at things on Friday.

Yvonne off to Bannockburn with some horses and Tina, our
whippet bitch, who hasn't been well lately. She's 11½ years old, and we fear her time is
coming, but today she returned with some pain killers.

Another bloody power failure! This time it was only 1 second, but it took me 45 minutes to
recover: I discovered I had connected dereel to a power board which wasn't UPS
protected. At least the fsck didn't take the interminable time it did on Sunday. But it also gave me a list of things that didn't
restart on reboot: squid, synergys, my external mail tunnel and my satellite
statistic gatherer. To be fixed.

Finally got round to selling my Zuiko 14-42 lens on eBay. Or is that
“lense”? Of course not, but it's surprising how many people misspell it that
way. I suppose there will be even more now that eBay themselves spell it that way:

I had to look at the source of the page to discover what was written
underneath Browse...: it's a recommended size. And somehow the item came up as
being in Adelaide, but when I tried to change it, I was only able to change the (incorrect)
postal code:

After entering my post code it came up with the information “Adelaide, 3352”.
It wasn't until I tried tabbing through the window that I found the name of the town hidden
beyond the bottom. They had conveniently supplied it without a scroll bar to hide things
better:

Plenty to do today—I was supposed to brew, but somehow I put it off yet again, and
instead baked. I can brew tomorrow,
as Rumpelstiltskin said. Spent
some more time working on migration issues; it's surprising how much work it is. Also some
work in the garden: our Ipomoea (Morning
Glory) seeds had not only taken well to being covered in hot water, but were actively
germinating, so we had to find somewhere to plant them.

It's been over two weeks since I applied for a VoIP connection for my satellite link, and
finally I chased people up about it. It looks as if I'm the first person they've had who
supplied his own equipment, and the sales people didn't really know what information I
needed. Once I got it, though, it took about 4 minutes to configure: 3 to search the maze
of little twisty menus, all different, that the SPA 3000 supplies, and one minute to
configure it—and it worked! Compared with previous confrontations with the SPA 3000,
that's marvellous, especially since the last time the connection was unbelievably bad over
satellite.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. There's some configuration problem on the server that allows
registration when the unit powers up, but not afterwards:

While on the topic of phones, Yvonne picked up a SIM card for
her mobile phone from Optus. They're no more
sympathetic than Telstra, but their prepaid
mobile phone credit expires more slowly. We barely use mobile phones, but Telstra's
cheapest tariff costs at least $13 a month, most of which expired unused. Optus has a $30
“plan” (i.e. tariff) that lasts 6 months, only $5 a month, so it's worth it.
But on putting the SIM in Yvonne's phone, I got the message “SIM blocked”.
Called up Optus to ask what that meant and got another stupid voice menu
system, as bad as the one Telstra uses.

Finally got past that, got the confirmation of my fears that the phone was locked to
Telstra. But it seems you can unlock them over the phone—for Telstra the number to
call (with another stupid voice menu!) is 1 300 720 179. They tell you how to extract the
IMEI number from the phone (*#06#), but they don't tell you how to keep it on the
display long enough to copy it, nor that the number is written somewhere near the SIM card
slot, which in these circumstances is clearly the preferable method. It didn't cost
anything, so unlocked mine too, which also needed it. The Optus cards certainly don't have
the coverage they claim to have in their brochures—that would be grounds enough to
return it, since we can barely use the phones here—but in fact we don't want to
use them here, and they should work OK in Ballarat.

My lens has sold already, with “Buy it now”. Is that a good or a bad sign? I
got $120 for it, while the last similar object sold for $85, From that point of view I
suppose it's good; and a higher “Buy it now” price might just have got me my
equivalent of $85.

We need to progress with the stage. CJ came along on the way back from a funeral and
discussed the matter; we're planning to build a back-slanting roof with a gutter against the
house.